


Live Again

by hardscrabble



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Recovery, Teaching, playing with hair and talking about relativity, post-apocalyptic fairy princesses use what they have
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-16 09:57:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5824267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardscrabble/pseuds/hardscrabble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After making the Citadel their own, the once-Wives begin to figure out how to live in this place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Live Again

                Cheedo never got really comfortable around the Warboys. The pups, though—especially the new adoptees from the Wretched, orphans who were never going to be forced to cut off their hair—the pups were sweet. She thought. They might be sweet. They might not have all the life out of them yet. They might still have blood, not oil. 

                After allocation one morning, when Cheedo had just been given a rest day and stood in the sunlight, thinking of what to do with her rest—everything as a Wife had _been_ rest, she thought, and that had made her rest _less_ , which was funny now—some skinny kid (they were all skinny) sidled over, black pants, bare chalked upper, but dark hair in masses, and stopped in Cheedo’s shadow. “How’d you make your hair go twisty?” the skinny kid said. “It’s all shiny in the sun—I mean it’s always all shiny, like, it’s my color but all smooth, but when it’s twisty it’s _different_ shiny, and it’s so chrome—” 

                “Bronze, more like,” she said, something Capable had shown her once, in one of the old books, one with smooth glossy paper and pictures. “Oiled bronze.” 

                “What?” 

                “Not chrome. It’s a different metal.” Cheedo smiled at the pup, whose head was tilted and eyes were saying _not chrome?_ “We don’t have it here.” 

                She saw the process of the pup picking over that idea and tossing it, useless. “ _Shine_ , though.” Focused on the real thing, like Furiosa with a gun. “How?” 

                So Cheedo undid her braid, one from the hair by her left ear that she’d looped over her head like the band of Capable’s goggles and stuck into place with a tiny twist of fine wire, and re-braided it for the kid to see, but a little vice-grip of a hand was on her wrist in a flash—

                 She froze.

                 “Go slower?” the pup said. “That looked like magic. Is it magic?”

                 Cheedo started breathing again, and reminded herself that not every fast movement by someone black-and-white meant she was going to die. “It’s not magic,” she said. “I’ve just known it for awhile. It’s kind of automatic.”

                 “Auto?”

                 “No, not like—” Cheedo shook her head, frustrated, and sat down on the smooth floor, and asked the pup if he—she? Tangles of brown hair, like hers back when she’d first come to the Citadel—Cheedo asked the pup to go fetch some cord.           

                “How much?” 

                “Just some.” 

                The pup came back with a coil of enough cord to wrap a war rig—and friends. Five friends, two bald older pups, white-painted with black-outlined hungry eyes (they all had hungry eyes) and three more of the newer adoptees. One blond—not as blond as the Dag, of course—and two reddish-brown broad-shouldered kids, thick black hair tied back at the napes of their necks. “Dusty said Miss Cheedo’s teaching magic,” one explained. Dusty, the cord-fetcher, her first pup, laid the neat heap of cord next to her on the stone. 

                Cheedo bit her lip and looked at the cord, thinking, planning. “It’s not magic,” she said, and got to work. She started at one end of the coil, pulling out an arm's length of cord at a time and slicing it with her good little knife, a gift from the Dag after everything. The ends started fraying. 

                “ _Smeg_ —um—excuse me.” The kids, all six, nodded. Like a little class, like she and the Dag and Capable and Toast had with the Vuvalini, listening to what it had been like in the green place. Or like all of them, all of the women and Nux, poor Nux, when the fool—Max—had said they might turn back from the salt. So she ran off to the supplies rooms and snitched a bit of epoxy, one of the little one-use packets, and a ceramic bowl. When she got back to this space—just a space, in the middle of the Citadel, under the sun—the six were waiting. 

                She mixed the two parts of the epoxy with the knife—and cleaned the blade carefully on her own wrap—and stuck the cord ends straight in for a few seconds, then left them to dry for a bit. _No, wait_ — _make it easier_. Before the goo set, she grabbed three lengths at a time and pressed one end of each together with her fingers. She knew there was a solvent for this kind of thing—or she knew Capable knew there was a solvent for this kind of thing, which was the same, honestly, and she could deal with sticky fingers as long as they weren't stuck together. 

                The pups watched, entranced. Six—no, seven, one for her so they'd all be looking at the same thing—sets of three cord lengths, as long as her arm plus the length from shoulder to shoulder, and she was little compared to Capable and the Dag and—fine, she was _fragile_ compared to Toast, but it was still enough cord. Sealed at both ends and stuck together at one. Then they had to set fully, enough so the pups wouldn't get stuck to each other, and she laid them out on the floor right next to the wall. She outlined that bit in chalk and wrote DONT TOUCH, then drew a picture: a hand, circled, with an X through it and an angry face.

                She turned to face the six and listened to the Citadel. The shadows on the floor said it was about midday. “Meals,” she said. “Get to the canteen, get some good food in y—” 

                “Wait, when's the magic, Miss Cheedo?” said the first pup. Dusty. 

                “This is part of it,” she replied. “A lot of learning takes time.”               

                Braiding her own hair, even the simple three-strands she did usually, had taken months of aching arms to perfect. The Dag had jeered but watched, carefully, with her pale eyes. When Cheedo did her first crown braid—it took all the hair, all the way around her head, and put it into a neat circlet, with slices showing her scalp between the strands of brown—the Dag had started calling her Princess, even though the sections were lumpy and the circlet wasn't even all the way around. 

                “We're doing magic, though,” said the tiny blond pup. “Magic isn't learning.” 

                “There's no magic,” Cheedo said absently, and then froze again. _Immortan_ —no. That was past. She shook herself, visibly, she was sure, and said much more clearly, “Magic is stories. Weaving hair is skills. Skills are learning, but they're real. And real takes time, otherwise everything real ever would all happen at once.” 

                Capable had found a book, once, an old one, about something incomprehensible, and talked for days—whenever asked; she was usually silent—about time and space and how they were the same, except it took time to get through space, so everything didn't all happen everywhere all the time. Cheedo was certain she had missed most of the sense, but the pups were looking at her gravely, and when she nodded at them and repeated, “So real takes time,” they nodded back. And when she added, “Know what else takes time? _Eating_ ,” they grinned and scampered. 

                Just as intended. 

 

                And later, probably not quite long enough for the epoxy to reach full strength but who needed that, they would just be braiding, the six pups materialized again. Cheedo was ready; she'd found seven chunks of Citadel rock half the size of her fist, each, to weigh down the fixed-together end on the floor. Now she'd sit in the middle, with three pups on a side, curving in a little so they could see her but all facing pretty much the same direction. That would have to be easier than learning it backwards, like she had from pictures in the old books in the Wives’ rooms. 

                Two hours passed, and each pup had finished a yard-long strip of braided cord. They didn't all lie flat and some had odd twists in places, but they were braids, and the pups had made them, and that was as real as skills and meals and time. She started to show them how to knot the ends, but each finished off the three dangling bits of cord—a few inches, a finger's length—with a custom knot that came off their own fingers like water. Of course. They had their own skills, too. 

                “What do we do with them?” the black-haired girl—she was a girl, she’d announced that and looked at the other pups like she was daring them to do something about it, but they just looked back like _you want a medal?_ so she had shrugged and said her name was Seera—said then. “We've got some cord done up in a bit. I know you said it wasn't magic, but—” 

                “We’re not finished, you know,” Cheedo interrupted. “These were tests, practice, the beginning of a skill. Hair is a bit harder. There’s a lot more of it.” 

                “Can we try with yours?” Seera said, and then looked a bit shocked at herself. 

                Cheedo’s first thought was _NO,_ with such violence that when it stopped echoing off the inside of her skull she found herself drawn into a tiny ball, to hold the terror in. The pups waited, silent, until Dusty said, “There's only one Cheedo and six of us, though, it'd take forever, and Miss Cheedo has her own things—” 

                Giving her an out. Cheedo could have wept. But didn't. It also gave her _time_ , though, Dusty’s unexpected kindness, and she thought in that time and uncurled. “A braid doesn't have to take a whole Cheedo,” she said, and her voice maybe shook a little. “I can do—this—” and she thought to herself fiercely, I _can_ do this, and split her hair, long and flat and dark, down the middle of her head with her fingers, no mirror but it felt even enough, and into tails on both sides. She left one side alone and combed the other into three chunks with her fingers. Wire, the fine rubber-coated kind that she kept scraps of—loops of it, maybe a bit too tight because she was nervous and working faster than she could think so she wouldn’t catch up with herself and get stuck—but they still secured the hair where she wanted it. 

                “Oh good,” said the blond—Tello—with dryness you could only get from the Wretched, even the ones who weren’t so wretched anymore now. “Now there's two Cheedo hairs. Only _half_ forever.” 

                Cheedo pointed at Tello. “Wrong,” she said firmly, and Tello’s eyes widened. Cheedo crooked her finger. “Sit by me,” she said, and patted the floor by her knee. Tello moved. “Now take this bit,” she said, and held out the hank of wire-sectioned hair closest to her eye to Tello. “And split it into three. And braid that.” 

                Tello’s eyes went wider. “ _Six_ Cheedo hairs,” intoned under her (Cheedo suspected) breath. And the pups caught on. Seera took the middle section on that side. Dusty, who Cheedo trusted the most if only because Dusty had been the first, took the back one, where she couldn't see him—or her—but she would have to just settle herself. They’re _pups_ , she thought to herself, angry. Cheedo the Fragile died when Nux the Warboy did. Kill her for real now. _Live again._  

                The two elder pups, still silent but cord-braids wrapped around their chalked waists, took the first two sections on her other side. The last pup, Seera's seeming-twin, took the back. 

                She dug her fingernails, what there was of them, into her hands and did not tremble once. Not for a whole hour, not even when the pups pulled. “Gentle,” she heard herself say, feeling like she was very very very far away, farther than the green place, out above the salt flats, out in nowhere. “That’s me you’re yanking at.” 

                “Sorry, m’m,” muttered the oldest pup, sitting opposite Dusty. 

                “We’ll be careful,” said Seera, authoritative. “You’re a good teacher, Miss Cheedo.”

 

 

                When Cheedo went back to the Dag that night, her hair was still in six braids, three on a side. Seera's was precise; Dusty's enthusiastic—the sections uneven—and Tello's wispy. The elder pups had done one loose and one tight, the middle braid with twice the crossovers of the front one, and Seera's seeming-twin had reversed directions—all the sections were crossed from underneath, not from over the top. An inside-out braid. Or a mirror image. 

                And she was wound up so tight on the inside she felt like she’d topple over or catch fire if she moved too fast. She carried herself slow and felt her whole skin shake like it hadn’t when there was six pups around her with their hands in her hair. Everything along her shoulders into her jaw and all the way up her scalp was tensioned, rusty, creaking like the fool’s voice—Max’s voice—had back when everything was just starting to happen, when Max was barely a person, barely a body, a bundle of trying dressed up like a man and ready to kill the first thing that— 

                “I taught the pups,” she said to the Dag’s quirked eyebrows—she, everything, looked too much like before, _before_ before, before anything, when Cheedo had been barely a wife and the Dag was a wild white-blond fury who found the entire world hilarious and ripe for cutting. She couldn’t keep her voice steady. “They needed to practice—” Her throat closed and she took tiny breaths, through her nose, as the Dag got up from her table and her little pot of thick-leaved green. Cheedo stared at it until it blurred. 

                The Dag did not laugh, or jeer. She touched each braid, each one tied off not with a black-thumb knot but with a bit of string or fabric or cord that each pup had had on them somewhere, and smoothed her hand against the flat hair on either side of Cheedo's hasty part. The smoothing, with Dag’s calloused palms and smell like green things and sweet, melted her a little bit, brought her back a little bit.               

                Then the Dag picked up Cheedo's hands and felt them, and Cheedo breathed in sharply when her thumbs swept the stinging crescents left by her fingernails. She hadn't thought she’d been holding onto herself that hard; she’d been so far away, so far out, sending herself so she wouldn’t be there when things went bad. _That_ was from before-before, one of those things she’d taught herself. That wasn’t supposed to be necessary now. That wasn’t living again. She squeezed her eyes shut, shamed. Pups. Only _pups_ and she was— 

                “Bravest princess ever was,” the Dag said, soft as soft. “The bravest, kindest—” an interruption as a kiss landed, like a petal, on her forehead— “royalest princess ever was.”


End file.
